The Front Page and Netbooks

Well, it seems as if the powers that be have finally waded down to the shallow end of the pool to find some poor schmuck to feature on the front page Community Spotlight.  Thanks to ATC and everyone else involved for thinking of me for that feature.

Speaking of the Front Page,  if you're like me you have your bookmarks for the site set to start at your clan page or some other favorite section of the site and often don't even look at the front page of the site for weeks at a time.  After being asked to help contribute via the Plastic Rockers column, I was let in on what it takes to get stories up for the site.  Let me just say that there's a lot of effort that goes on behind the scenes to get news, information and entertaining stories up on the front page.  Don't forget to check it out once in a while.  Leave some feedback once in a while.  There's some really good stuff up there.  Even some of the articles about games that I don't care for are often very funny and informative.

On another note....

My wife's laptop recently bit the dust.  It appears to be plauged by a bad motherboard and since it's 3+ years old, I don't think I want to deal with trying to replace the MB.  I've been giving serious consideration to buying a Netbook to replaced it.  She doesn't use her current laptop for much more than updating her Zune, email, web browsing and occasional document editing for work.  It seems like the Netbooks are ideal for that type of use and as a bonus they're pretty cheap.

The only drawback I'm concerned about is the lack of an optical drive.  We do use her old laptop to watch movies if we're on an extended plane ride.  Also the smallish processors that are installed in most of them makes me wonder if it will be fast enough and not seem sluggish.  That was one of Lisa's biggest complaints towards the end of the life of the last laptop.

Anyone have any experience with these devices?  Would I be better off finding an inexpensive full fledged laptop?